April 28, 2012

I'm at SharePoint Saturday Boston today and am noticing a particular trend - in the sessions I'm attending, from Beginner-level content management or Advanced-level automated site provisioning (and everything in between), the speaker's message to the audience includes this:

CONSIDER THE USERS.

This is not to say that the excellent presenters at SharePoint Saturday Boston have not delivered this message in the past; it's more to say that at this, the biggest SharePoint Saturday Boston has yet seen, the theme seems pervasive through the wide variety of subject matter.

I'm so happy to see this focus throughout the talks (not only in Governance and Adoption sessions). My guess is that innovations in user experience on the Web and in consumer technology products have made a focus on UX, even in SharePoint, impossible to ignore.

The audience is as interactive and collaborative as ever, and not only have I learned some new tricks today, I've been able to make new connections with smart and passionate people in this community.

Design Observer from the Design Observer Group - browse this thought leadership, or if you only have time for one article, read Where We Work - "...if you think about the space where creative work actually gets done, and what writers and designers and quite a few artists are really looking at all day, the relevant framework is probably not a room, or a window. It’s probably a screen."

The purpose of the app is to make it easier for you to do a self-assessment on the maturity of your SharePoint implementation. After you step through the competencies and choose your levels, it generates a report of your results, and an additional report of those results compared to the global average:

You can print and share this report with your team, and use it as a resource as you're building your roadmap for future enhancements to your implementation.

No registration or login is required to take the assessment - just click the link and begin! Any identifying information you provide will be kept completely confidential.

We're especially excited because it's a completely Cloud-based solution, with the Silverlight front end living on a hosted SharePoint site (thanks to the folks at FPWeb), and the data stored in Azure. It was truly a team effort to produce, and I want to thank all the folks at BlueMetal who participated, as well as my distinguished panel of beta-testers, who are all well-known experts in the SharePoint community. Special recognition goes to Julie Turner, who built the application, and without whom it would not have been possible.

I'll be at SPTechCon San Francisco all week, where I'll be presenting three sessions as well as celebrating the launch of Mark Miller's book SharePoint 2010 at Work, released to print yesterday, which includes my chapter on SharePoint Maturity. If you'll be at the conference too, let's connect! And whether or not you're in San Francisco this week, I encourage you to find your levels, get your report, and build your roadmap to greater SharePoint maturity!

February 12, 2012

In my work implementing SharePoint at organizations of many different kinds and sizes, I've seen a trend that I wanted to share, with the hope of starting a conversation about how we can improve the way we all collaborate.

Here's the background:

A company will have an initiative around collaboration sites / project sites / team sites (call them what you will). Maybe there has been no centralized place to collect work-in-progress around a specific goal, or maybe there's an older system that has fallen into disuse or disorganization, and needs an update. Maybe the organization has a metric around improved innovation or findability, or wants to combat the use of outside-the-firewall resources for shared work efforts (e.g. Google, DropBox). Whatever the situation, the company makes the decision to implement SharePoint for collaboration.

This is generally where I come in. The company hires their local SharePoint experts to help get them up and running. The joint project team will invest time in designing a template or templates for the collaboration sites, possibly developing some custom functionality if the requirements call for it, and in some cases automating the request and provisioning process, so that end-users can either create new collaboration sites on their own, or can fill out a form and route the request through a standard process. Increasingly, the company will have some flavor of enterprise social computing, where the end users can vote and comment on content, subscribe to topics, post updates, and see activity streams. We test the solution, incorporate feedback, receive some form of signoff, move all the new collaborative functionality into Production, train the end-users (who, of course, have received communication about the coming change along the way), and that's a wrap for that scope of work. The IT department can tell their executives, "The deployment was a success, we now have collaboration." There is a mental checking of the box.

Here's the problem:

That nice robust technology solution isn't collaboration. Nor is even the most well-populated and highly-used collaboration site, if it's the kind I typically see. Let me demonstrate.

Take a look at the following team site. It has many of the components of the ones I work on every day - a task list, a calendar, document storage, contact information, announcements, and even a picture of the day to keep things dynamic and engaging. The entire team can contribute or remove anything at any time with no restrictions. The site is an important hub of frequently-changing information, accessed multiple times a day.

Is it the most mature team site in the world? Admittedly not - there's no remote access, no automated notifications on new content, no integration with other systems, and no ability to share the information with external contributors or collaborators. The items are not linked to each other, targeted, or personalized, there are no standard processes for archiving and storage, and there's no way to track metrics over site usage or content.

But even if all those more mature features were in place, I still wouldn't call this a collaboration site. Team members post information and other team members consume it. Sometimes they make updates to each other's information, for example if a meeting date changes or a task is completed. For the most part, this site is used exclusively for displaying and consuming information.

I call that publication.

It's easy to find definitions for Colllaboration that stop at "working together to produce or create something" or "working together to achieve a goal." They make it simple to check that mental box: "We're doing Collaboration!" But I'd like to go beyond these definitions and get at the more difficult, more valuable questions.

If you're thinking, "Our collaboration sites are perfectly good," I'll give another example that I see frequently. Let's say we're inside a product or service organization, where a team has formed around a sales pitch. One person on the team is given ownership of creating the draft pitch or proposal. Whether it takes the form of a slide deck, lengthy document, or multimedia presentation doesn't matter. He/she may start from a fresh template, but more likely starts from a good example of a pitch that he/she used before. Once the task owner completes the draft, he/she posts it to the team site for the others to review. The process is more fast-paced here than for actual project work, because the organization is competing against others and has committed to a rapid turnaround time for the pitch or proposal. The others on the team quickly review the materials, make changes each in their turn, and after a final round of review and approval, someone on the team (typically, a different team member than the one who drafted the original) goes through the materials, cleans up all the edits, and sends the document out to the customer.

Everyone worked together to produce or create something - check!

But the original creator of the materials didn't see any of the revisions that came out of the review process. Because it happened so quickly, and/or changes weren't tracked or weren't able to be tracked, and/or the individual had to move right on to the next project or pitch, they don't know which improvements the other team members made to their work. The next time they're tasked with creating a similar pitch, they will do it the same way they did before, and won't be able to bake in any learnings from the process. If the team happens to lose the sale, to what extent do any of the team members know why? It's not an easy thing to get feedback from a customer on why you may not have been successful, but even if the sales lead asks for and receives this feedback, to what extent is it incorporated into the overall effort? If, somewhere else in the company, a different sales team comes up with an innovative new way to make a pitch, how quickly does that innovation reach our example team so that they can start using it as their go-to proposal template?

I could relate many more examples beyond the Sales process, but this post is already long, and my point is: a group of people individually saving their work product to a teamsite and making revisions to it isn't enough. If we want to get better at what we do, we need to stop being complacent about our collaboration efforts. These are a few of the questions I'd like for us to start asking before we check the We've-Got-Collaboration box:

Are we producing new insights, ideas, or approaches, and feeding them back into the system?

Are we learning, or just repeating?

Are we making each other better as a result of our collaboration?

Are our ideas relating to and building on each other's, and serving as springboards to the next idea?

Does everyone on the team feel like they can express new ideas or ways of working?

Could we REALLY re-invent the wheel?

How can we tell a "good" collaboration experience from a "bad" one? (successful vs. unsuccessful, efficient vs. ineffecient, etc.)

How do we know if we're getting better at collaborating?

Does this process / platform / team make sense for what we need to do?

Many people before me have grappled with these issues and written about them. I'm including below a by-no-means comprehensive list of resources that informed this blog and reinforce what I'm trying to express. And I hope you'll drop me a line or a comment with your own questions, thoughts, or trusted resources on the subject of getting to a better, more valuable Collaborative place.

"This free result action web part adds four of the most commonly used document action menus to SharePoint search results. The solution adds a drop down menu similar to that found in SharePoint document libraries.

View Properties

Send Link Via Email

Add to My Links

Open Document Location

This web part deploys as a replacement to the Core Search Results web part in SharePoint 2010 and FAST Search for SharePoint."

Here's what you'll need in order to deploy and test it in your own environment:

- SharePoint 2010 with a functioning Search Service Application and Search CenterOR- SharePoint 2010 with FS4SP.AND- Access to the SharePoint server.

I have the download and can’t wait to try it in my SP 2010 dev environment. Definitely an easy step toward better Search experience and greater SharePoint Search Maturity!

This morning I took a moment to imagine what that infographic would look like if it told the truth about the tradeoffs we make with our enthusiastic embrace of social media and electronic devices.

Please note: I completely made up all the following numbers (though I feel they are not wildly off the mark).

On this first day of the year, when even the Google Doodle (see below) is promoting primarily offline ways to resolve, renew and celebrate, I'm hoping that we'll all spend more time unplugged in 2012 (and I don't mean thanks to a mobile device). I'm personally resolving that the time I do spend online will be more purposeful, with the goal to "subtract the obvious, and add the meaningful" (quote from John Maeda's Laws of Simplicity). Not exactly a S.M.A.R.T. goal, but it's a start.

Combine Documents and Website Links in One SharePoint Library by Eric Alexander

The book will be released in February 2012 in both hard copy and online versions. To receive a copy at a 40% discount, follow this link to the O'Reilly site to get more information, and use MILLERSP as the discount code.

Friday, 12/16/11 - this is the last day to save $450 on registration for SPTechCon San Francisco in February, and if you use discount code VANBUREN, you'll receive an additional $200 off, for a total discount of $650. Conference information here. I'll be presenting in three sessions: one on SharePoint Maturity, one with Derek Weeks on Business Process Maturity, and one with Chris McNulty on Data Visualizations in SharePoint.

I'm so excited about heading to work this morning, because Bob German is joining our team today. If you're not familiar with Bob's work either through Microsoft or the SharePoint community, I'll give you the 140-character version:

@Bob1German is #sharepoint developer & architect w/16 years exp at MSFT, frequent presenter, just published book on Silverlight & SP 2010.

I'm really looking forward to working with Bob, and the momentum that's building at work goes far beyond his joining us. I wanted to take this chance to say that for the first time in my life I'm experiencing a kind of workplace nirvana I haven't known before. People like Julie Turner, who just joined the team this fall, and Beatrice Baciu, one of the early hires at BlueMetal, are making my daily work life more collaborative and fun.

How to express this workplace nirvana succinctly for this blog? With Venn diagrams!

In the past few years I'd noticed that there was some, but not much, overlap in my network groups. I often envisioned a dream team where the really stellar people I'd worked with before, and the really stellar people from the community I'd only imagined working with, could come together with the really stellar people I was working with currently. Bonding and hilarity would ensue.

Well, it's happening.

That messy diagram is intentional, to show how much more overlap there is now. I get to work with friends and stellar co-workers from the past, and the group comprised of "never worked with them before but they're awesome to work with" is simply a much greater percentage of the "all co-workers" group. Kudos to the leadership of BlueMetal for putting together such a great team - they hit most of the workplace Twelve Attributes referenced below.

And those of you in the SharePoint community, note there's still a lot of room for that purple circle to move closer to the center. Please contact me if you think it would be as awesome to work with Bob, Julie, Beatrice, and all the other experts on the team, as I do!

December 09, 2011

Last week I had the opportunity to participate in a webinar, moderated by Derek Weeks of OpenText Global 360, to discuss the results of the latest survey "How Are Businesses Using Microsoft SharePoint In The Enterprise?" It was a great discussion, with Sue Hanley and Dave Coleman joining me as panelists. I wanted to follow up on the webinar with some data from the SharePoint Maturity Model that corresponds with the survey results.

A few items to note:

The demographics of the companies who've gone through the SharePoint Maturity assessment are quite similar to those who responded to the survey (see Slide 7 of the webinar presentation) - a wide range of company sizes, industries, and geographical locations.

The maturity levels mentioned below are defined here on sharepointmaturity.com.

Training

One of the first competencies in the survey that maps to the SP Maturity Model is Training (see Slide 22 of the webinar). According to the survey:

44% of companies responded they do not have a training program,

13% responded that they are dissatisfied with their training options,

37% responded they are satisfied/comfortable,

6% that they are Very Satisfied.

Looking at the SharePoint Maturity data, the overall average for Staffing and Training is 340 - or about the midpoint of the maturity scale (where content owners from some functional areas are trained on the system). This improves with time - 1-3 years of SharePoint use averages in the 200s (training is informal or ad-hoc, in other words no training program), and 5-9 years of use averages in the 400s (multiple training offerings exist).

Given the relationship of training to adoption, I think there's a lot of opportunity here for organizations to evaluate their SharePoint training offerings early in their implementation cycle, and to put a training plan together (so that they can answer that survey question differently next time!). This doesn't have to mean hiring resources to run a formal training program; it could be as simple as some embedded videos around the intranet, a custom Help file, some power users who can make themselves available for questions, etc.

Integration

The next competency in the model that aligns with the survey is Integration (see slide 42 of the webinar). The survey asked "Are you exposing legacy or other application data?"

18% access their data through a separate interface

9% respond that SP data is integrated into a different system and pulled by users from that system

34% access some legacy data through SharePoint

7% access all legacy and new data via a single interface in SP

28% say data to SharePoint is not currently available

3% responded "other"

To me, these results indicate that at least 46% of the respondents' data and/or systems have no integration point with SharePoint, other than perhaps a link to external systems. In terms of maturity assessments, organizations' average rating is 216 overall (where a single system is integrated with SharePoint, aside from Active Directory). Organizations fall in the high 100s to low 200s for 1-5 years of SharePoint use, and from 200 to the low 300s for 6-9 years of use.

Although integration is a more complex undertaking than some of the other SharePoint competencies, it also has a bearing on adoption and user satisfaction, and directly affects an organization's ability to get to the next level in terms of business intelligence and insight. In the next survey I'd love to see that 28% number go down.

Search

Survey respondents rated the most beneficial SP capability to be "Improved content search and navigation across site collection boundaries" (see slide 46 of the webinar) - which I am classifying in the Search competency. While it's great that organizations are enjoying improved findability, there is still a lot of potential here - overall the maturity rating for Search is 191. Maturity levels remain low over many years of use with no discernible trend toward greater maturity. As Sue Hanley pointed out during the webinar, one of the keys to search issues is that SEARCH LITERACY IS NOT PERVASIVE among users. This should be one of the facets of any SharePoint training program.

Business Process

The final competency addressed by the survey is Business Process - and here the survey maps the question directly to the five maturity levels (thanks Derek!). Here's how the survey responses compare to the maturity assessments I've received:

Fall 2011 SharePoint Survey

Maturity Assessments

Initial

100

42%

34%

Managed

200

37%

25%

Defined

300

12%

29%

Predictable

400

5%

5%

Optimizing

500

5%

6%

101%

100%

The consistency of the 400 and 500 level responses make it clear how few organizations are really optimizing business processes in SharePoint. When these results are layered with data for years of use, a steady progression is evident, however even the longest users and largest organizations are not hitting the 400 mark on average.

It's great to have this growing body of data both from the SharePoint Survey and from the maturity assessments that continue to come in. I'm confident that we'll see improvement over the years. Thanks again to Derek, Sue and Dave for a great conversation!